Read the latest campus information on coronavirus (COVID-19) here →

Tag: Management Entrepreneurship and Technology

‘We’re just getting started.’ Saikat Chaudhuri on what’s next for the M.E.T. Program

| by Kim Girard
Saikat with MET students
“Our mission is to create leaders who can combine engineering and business to solve the world’s most pressing challenges” —Saikat Chaudhuri, faculty director for the Management, Entrepreneurship & Technology (M.E.T.) Program at Haas.

Saikat Chaudhuri recently celebrated his first year as faculty director for the Management, Entrepreneurship & Technology (M.E.T.) Program at Berkeley Haas—and says he’s just getting started. 

Chaudhuri came to Haas from Wharton, where he was on the faculty for 16 years. He quickly became an enthusiastic champion of both UC Berkeley and M.E.T., the highly competitive dual-degree program jointly founded by Berkeley Haas and Berkeley Engineering in 2016. Along with overseeing M.E.T., he now teaches the two connected courses in the program, which enrolls about 55 students each year. In addition to serving as faculty director, Chaudhuri also holds the Grimes M.E.T. Chancellor’s Chair.

What are you the most proud of accomplishing during your first year?

I think what I’m most proud about—and what I hadn’t expected—is how much traction we’ve been able to get as such a young program. Academically, it’s very hard to build a reputation for a new program. Whether it’s our huge application numbers or even the press coverage, it’s really exciting for us to be noticed out there. And we are giving the finest peer institutions a run for their money, if I may add.

I’m also grateful for the fact that we have so much support everywhere: The two deans, the chancellor, the provost, our principal donor, are all behind us and they’re available, offering their counsel and backing whenever we need. And without the extraordinarily talented and dedicated program staff — Executive Director Chris Dito, Associate Director Dawn Kramer, and Marketing & Data Analytics Manager Althea Escalante – we would not be where we are. 

We’ve come a long way. M.E.T. is attracting the best and brightest students for these two degrees, and they are pursuing them seamlessly, then embarking on accelerated careers that will make a mark! 

Founding class of MET students
The founding class of M.E.T. (Management, Entrepreneurship, & Technology Program) students at orientation week in 2017.
(Photo: Noah Berger)

M.E.T. is a unique program. Few schools offer degrees in business and engineering from two top-ranked undergrad programs. How do you explain the mission of M.E.T. ?

Our mission is to create leaders who can combine engineering and business in order to solve the world’s most pressing challenges in a scalable and sustainable way. And when I say leaders, I mean a diverse set of leaders: We want people from all kinds of backgrounds, industries, and locations, from Silicon Valley to the rest of the world. We want to be in a place where we can attract the most diverse, best, and brightest talent who also have the sense of that mission. Then we want to be able to give them the tools they need to go and transform industries, to disrupt healthcare, revolutionize  transportation, solve climate change, do all of that. This is all driven by Berkeley’s core strength and innate culture: a desire to have a positive impact on society. And that is what I believe will be our competitive advantage!

Our mission is to create leaders who can combine engineering and business in order to solve the world’s most pressing challenges in a scalable and sustainable way.

Photo of Saikat Chaudhuri, faculty director for the Management, Entrepreneurship & Technology (M.E.T.) Program at Haas.
Saikat Chaudhuri, faculty director for the Management, Entrepreneurship & Technology (M.E.T.) Program at Haas.

So what’s already in the works?

We’ve been working on a number of different areas. One is on the curricular side, where I redesigned the two dedicated linking courses all M.E.T.s take as cohorts. We had a freshman course and we had a senior course around leadership, but it was general and there was very little on management, entrepreneurship or technology, so I revamped these. I turned them into courses on technological innovation, entrepreneurship, and disruption. We introduced capstone projects as part of these classes. The freshmen last semester worked with aerospace manufacturer Blue Origin on commercial space applications. And the seniors worked on a project to help Indian communications company Tata Communications think about new technologies that are coming down the pipeline to  create a new billion-dollar business.

On the co-curricular side, we have an incubator/accelerator that we’re working on which  will have different components including an educational piece that we’ve started, a peer advising service that we’re launching this spring, and eventually small seed grants to allow students to pursue ventures. We don’t want to replicate everything at UC Berkeley, but there are a few things where we know that we could augment the entrepreneurial ecosystem, and where M.E.T. students can offer support to the rest of campus.

In addition, since we just graduated our first class last May, we’ve launched an alumni program which we refer to as  “M.E.T. for Life.” The idea is to build a strong community that begins on campus and benefits M.E.T.s throughout one’s career and life no matter what stage they’re in, current student, recent alumni, or established alumni. We’re starting  regional chapters, events, and online forums, along with a database that includes everybody so they can connect.

What’s next for M.E.T.?

We call our next phase M.E.T. 2.0.  I see four big  opportunities. One is more integration, rather than just parallel studies, among technology and management, engineering and business in the experience we offer. The second is a much deeper and broader set of connections to the real world  in terms of expanding to  more geographies and more industries in our curriculum, extracurriculars, and job recruiting. A third area is doing more with diversity, equity, and inclusion. And the fourth is the tremendous chance to do more marketing, getting more visibility for the program nationally and also globally. We’re sort of at the IPO moment: Now we can really spread our wings, we can have true impact. 

How does diversity and inclusivity fit into the program?

Attracting, nurturing, and sending to the world a diverse and inclusive talent pool in all its forms is a goal we are embracing not only because it’s the right thing to do, but also because innovation and entrepreneurship benefit from different perspectives. So we want to be at the forefront of dismantling barriers, removing biases, and creating opportunities. This is very personal for me; being of Indian background, growing up in Germany attending an international school, and studying and working in the U.S. allowed me to work with people from all over the world from childhood, so I’ve experienced the power a multicultural, multifaceted group of friends and colleagues can bring.

Being of Indian background, growing up in Germany attending an international school, and studying and working in the U.S. allowed me to work with people from all over the world from childhood, so I’ve experienced the power a multicultural, multifaceted group of friends and colleagues can bring.

In that spirit, we’re doing a number of things in M.E.T. to further diversity, equity, and inclusion, beyond scholarships, which are one enabler. In our curriculum, because we believe it is a critical workplace skill to have, we’re building in workshops on managing diverse teams and points of view into the freshman and upper level  program courses that I teach. 

Another project we’re working on right now is a high school summer program launching in 2023 that we hope will serve as a great pipeline for diversity for us. It’s important to find these prospective applicants, high school students who might not necessarily have found the opportunity to apply directly to our program or who haven’t been exposed to these kinds of areas. 

All in all, I can’t wait for what the future holds for M.E.T. I think we’re just getting started. I can reveal that we’ve got a few more initiatives up our sleeves to take our program to the next level over the next few years. I want us to play a part in letting UC Berkeley shine as a whole. The university is among the top five worldwide in my opinion, and we’ll try to help showcase why I truly believe these students are going to be at the forefront of solving the world’s most pressing challenges. I think they’re going to disrupt every industry that you can imagine for the better.

Founding class of M.E.T. students graduates

| by Kim Girard

When Michelle Lu, BS 21, applied to UC Berkeley four years ago, she planned to study engineering.

But then she checked a box that changed her future.

“There are only a few decisions that really change the course of one’s life,” said Lu, who is among 41 students in the founding Management, Entrepreneurship & Technology (M.E.T.) class that graduated last Saturday. “Applying to and attending M.E.T. was one of those decisions for me.”

Michelle Lu
2021 M.E.T. graduate Michelle Lu

M.E.T., a 2017 collaboration between the Haas School of Business and the UC Berkeley College of Engineering, grants graduates two degrees—in engineering and business—after four years.

“We’re so proud of these students, who are graduating with a unique and valuable set of business skills—from leadership to microeconomics— and specialized engineering talent,” said Erika Walker, assistant dean of undergraduate programs. “We can’t wait to see what this class accomplishes with these two degrees.”

Program founder Michael Grimes, EECS 87, and head of Global Technology Investment Banking at Morgan Stanley, said the the pioneering first M.E.T. graduates are already living up to the expectations set when the program was established.

“With deep technology training and business and management skills already developed, the incredibly successful career launches of the founding class of M.E.T. proved the unlimited demand for these uniquely dual skilled technology leaders,” he said.

Launching a new program

The M.E.T. program is highly competitive, drawing about 2,500 applications for just 40 slots in the inaugural class—an acceptance rate of less than 3%. “It was a leap of faith for students to join this new program when they had really compelling offers from other schools,” said Chris Dito, M.E.T.’s executive director. Dito praised Dawn Kramer, M.E.T.’s associate director, for her work to launch and expand the program and for her deep commitment to the students. “It’s not easy to launch a new program at a public university,” she said. “It’s tricky and she helped pull it off.”

Part of the challenge was admitting the right students, which Kramer believes they did. “The students demonstrated their interests from the start, and we were able to keep opening doors and providing opportunities for them at Berkeley. They took advantage of that,” she said.

MET class photo from 2017
The founding M.E.T. class in 2017. Photo: Noah Berger

Akshat Gokhale, BS 21, who earned the undergraduate Department Citation with a 4.0 GPA, praised the intellectual diversity of the M.E.T. students. “Each of us has a different background and story, and each of us is harnessing our dual degree in a distinct way,” said Gokhale, who is heading to McKinsey’s Digital Group as a business analyst. “So, no matter what you’re interested in researching or building, there’s most likely someone in M.E.T. who can help.”

No matter what you’re interested in researching or building, there’s most likely someone in M.E.T. who can help. – Akshat Gokhale, BS 21

Developing their resumes

The job offers M.E.T. students are accepting reflect the program’s intersection of business and tech, and they say their internships played a critical role in developing their resumes.

Lu said M.E.T. provided the kinds of opportunities that “you couldn’t get anywhere else,” including an internship at Zoom, which she landed sophomore year.  “I started as a project manager and by the end I was doing everything.” (Grimes helped establish the first M.E.T. internships at Zoom). She’s now heading to a job as a technology investment analyst at Morgan Stanley.

Michael Trehan
Michael Trehan

Ganeshkumar Ashokavardhanan, BS 21, said the quality of mentorship in the M.E.T. program was “immensely helpful and inspiring—everything from the office hours with M.E.T. board members to the access to tech and business leaders who visited campus to the fellowships and internships the program provided.” As a freshman, Ashokavardhanan was chosen as a Kleiner Perkins Fellow, (along with fellow M.E.T. student Louie McConnell) from thousands of applicants. As a fellow, he interned at one of Kleiner’s portfolio companies.

Ashokavardhanan was also selected for the Accel Scholars mentorship program, where he learned about venture capital, how to fund a company and how to lead product and engineering teams. After interning for two summers at Microsoft on the Azure cloud computing team, he accepted a job with the company.

Michael Trehan, BS 21, said his experiences in the M.E.T. program equipped him to apply for a job that he’d typically need an MBA to get. He interned in software engineering at Intel and on the project management team of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco before taking a summer analyst internship at JP Morgan, where he has accepted a full-time tech analyst job in San Francisco. “I never thought I would be doing this when I came into Berkeley,” Trehan said. “But here I am graduating early and doing investment banking out of the M.E.T. program. I’m super grateful.”

With the first class bidding farewell to M.E.T., a new class of 56 students will arrive on campus this fall.

Saikat Chaudhuri, M.E.T.’s new faculty director, said he has three long-term goals for the program. These include re-imagining the curricular and co-curricular offerings, creating a summer program for high school students, and developing M.E.T. into a lifelong community.

Student speaker to 2021 undergraduates: ‘Our story is just beginning’

|By Kim Girard, Natasha Payés
Five Haas undergraduates toss caps in the air.
2021 Haas graduates on campus tossing caps. From left to right: Richmond Tang, Michael Pratt, Hannah Miller, Tamarik Rabb, and Matt Portnov, all BS 21. (All students are roommates, except for Richmond Tang, who is vaccinated.) Photo: Matt Portnov.

On top of persevering through the rigorous curriculum, the Berkeley Haas undergraduate class of 2021 faced rolling blackouts, wildfires, and the global pandemic. It may not have been the experience they expected, but it will shape them for life, said commencement student speaker Phoebe Yin, BS 21.

“Today we celebrate something that’s unique to our generation: It’s a soft strength to stay malleable when the world is hard on us,” Yin said during virtual commencement last Saturday. “Our story is just beginning…we have nothing to stop us because we are ready for anything. To think only about the things we have lost would be to ignore the compassion, creativity, and unparalleled resilience we have gained.”

“Our story is just beginning.” – Phoebe Yin, BS 21.

The graduating class of 380 students included the first 41 graduates of the Management, Entrepreneurship & Technology (M.E.T.) program and three students graduating early from the Global Management Program (GMP).

The M.E.T. program, a collaboration between the Haas School of Business and the UC Berkeley College of Engineering, grants students two degrees in business and engineering in four years. GMP students enter Haas as freshmen and earn an undergraduate business degree with a concentration in global management.

“Your class has by far had the most impact on me during my time teaching here at Haas,” commencement speaker Diane Dwyer, BS 87.

Dwyer, a former broadcast journalist who is on the professional faculty at Haas, acknowledged that students are living in a time of widening income inequality—including within their own class. She noted that one of her students couldn’t afford to buy a working laptop, while another logged into class from a traveling adventure.

“…Stay humble…even in the midst of great accomplishments like the one you’re obtaining today. Stay resilient. The last 18 months have surely taught us that. And stay appreciative, even despite the unfairness and the obstacles that your class has faced,” she told the graduates.

Dean Ann Harrison, who wore full regalia for the sendoff commencement video, also congratulated the class for its many achievements.

“Your world was upended in the middle of your junior year at Haas due to a global pandemic, yet you showed true grit, mastering a rigorous academic curriculum during one of the most turbulent years any of us has experienced,” Harrison said.

Speakers praised the grads for all of their work outside of class during their years at Haas, including calling attention to racial injustice, winning case competitions, creating startups, and providing face masks to essential workers.

Erika Walker
“You met the challenge with grace, compassion, creativity, reflection, and in many cases, a redefined sense of purpose,” – Erika Walker

“You have endured over a year of college life that was unlike anything you could have ever imagined four years ago. Yet you met the challenge with grace, compassion, creativity, reflection, and in many cases, a redefined sense of purpose,” said Erika Walker, assistant dean of the Berkeley Haas undergraduate program.

Haas alumni, who ranged from more recent grads to veteran business leaders, also sent their well wishes and encouraged graduates to live by the Haas Defining Leadership Principles every day.

Among those alumni were Shantanu Narayen, MBA 93, chairman, president, and CEO of Adobe; Kenneth Chen, BS 03, vice president and chief audit executive at Spotify; Scott Galloway, MBA 92, a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business; and TubeMogul founder Brett Wilson, MBA 07; Austin Drake, BS 18, who works in global operations at Facebook; Double Bear Lucky Sandhu, BS 96, MBA 15, president of Reliance Financial; and Jordyn Elliot, BS 20, a marketing associate at Ingenio.

Award winners include:

Departmental Citation winner: Akshat Gokhale, (M.E.T graduate)

Students Always: Ananya Gupta

Beyond Yourself: Arman Kermanizadeh

Question the Status Quo: Erinn Wong

Confidence Without Attitude: Tamarik Rabb

Graduate Student Instructor (GSI) Award winner: Sooji Kim

Dan Mulhern, who teaches leadership in the Management of Operations Group as a member of the Haas professional faculty, won the Cheit Award for Excellence in Teaching. Students in each degree program choose faculty each year to receive the award, the top teaching honor at Berkeley Haas.

First M.E.T. student graduates, a year early

| by Maya Mirsky
Avathika Ramesh
Avanthika Ramesh is the first grad in the undergraduate M.E.T. program.

Avanthika Ramesh has more than one “first” under her belt. Not only is she the first student to finish UC Berkeley’s Management, Entrepreneurship & Technology (M.E.T.) program, she’s also the first to finish a year early.

A joint program launched in 2017 by Berkeley Haas and the College of Engineering, M.E.T. allows students to earn two undergraduate degrees in business and engineering in four years. Ramesh did it in three.

“It was an amazing experience,” said the 20-year-old, who is now at home in Georgia, working remotely for Salesforce in its competitive two-year Associate Product Manager program.

“An amazing young woman”

Undergraduates admitted to M.E.T. combine business courses with one of six engineering tracks. They spend time in class at both schools throughout the four years.

Michael Grimes, EECS 87, the head of Global Technology Investment Banking at Morgan Stanley and the founder of the M.E.T. Program, said Avanthika took full advantage of the M.E.T. curriculum, which offers deep technology skills, along with management and leadership education. “As a rising star associate product manager at Salesforce she is putting those skills to use with her trademark poise, excellence, and empathy,” he said. “The sky’s the limit with Avanthika.”

The sky’s the limit with Avanthika.

“She’s one of the most glorious students I’ve ever had the honor of working with,” said Chris Dito, executive director of the M.E.T. program. “She’s smart and humble and eager for information. She’s an amazing young woman and her accolades speak for themselves.”

A change in plan

It was almost by chance that Ramesh ended up in the M.E.T. program at all.

She planned to study electrical engineering and computer science (EECS). But when she was applying, she spied an option on the application to do EECS only, or EECS + Business. “I thought I’d give it a shot and picked the ‘EECS + Business’ option,” she said.

Soon after, she was invited to submit a supplemental essay for the M.E.T. program. After learning more about the program, she got excited about it.

Avanthika Ramesh with her classmates in MET
Ramesh (first row, third from right) at Berkeley’s M.E.T. (Management, Entrepreneurship, & Technology Program) new student orientation. Photo: Noah Berger

A budding entrepreneur, Ramesh said she was drawn to taking integrated coursework from Berkeley Haas and the College of Engineering.

“M.E.T. offered what I wanted to do in the future, but I never knew there was a program out there,” said Ramesh, who in high school founded her own tutoring business, HiFive Tutoring.

“What I learned from Haas was so useful for me,” she added. “Haas courses like marketing, finance, business communication, and organizational behavior, which in particular was one of the most useful classes for me, taught me a lot.”

She credits those courses in helping her to grow HiFive Tutoring from 15 to more than 500 clients. The dual major also allowed her to participate in hackathons and business competitions at Haas, as well as take on research and undergraduate student instructor opportunities.

While participating in case competition training workshops over the weekends, Ramesh said she received valuable mentorship from Dresden John, the undergraduate student experience manager, and Finance Lecturer Steve Etter.

An MBA in the future

Although she took on extra credits that enabled her to graduate early, Ramesh made time on the weekends to take morning hikes on the Berkeley fire trails, explored the city, and tried out restaurants in Berkeley and Oakland. She said her most memorable Haas moments were attending the Haas Gala and Haas Formal.

Haas Gala with Avanthika Ramesh
Avanthika Ramesh (left) at the Annual Haas Gala with friends.

Ramesh said she’s planning to earn an MBA in the future. She’s already been admitted to three MBA programs, including Berkeley Haas through the Accelerated Access program for UC Berkeley seniors, which lets students defer for several years to work. Ramesh will spend the next two years at Salesforce, training in product management at departments across the company.

“All of us in the Salesforce APM program are very strong in computer science but also have a lot of experience in business, leadership, and entrepreneurship” she said. “Salesforce wanted just that combination that M.E.T. prepared me for.”

 

Startup Diaries: SuperPetFoods places second at LAUNCH, BumpR retools

| by Kim Girard

Note: Berkeley Haas News followed two of this year’s 25 teams participating in LAUNCH, an accelerator for UC startup founders that has helped create more than 200 companies since 2015. At last Friday’s Demo Day finals, 10 UC teams remotely pitched VCs and angel investors, competing for $70,000 in funding. Startup SuperPetFoods made the finals; BumpR did not.

Superpetfoods team slide
Mar introducing her team members at Demo Day.

María (Mar) del Mar Londoño, MBA 21 and CEO of SuperPetFoods, headed into last week’s LAUNCH Demo Day finals determined. After failing to place in the top three at last month’s Hult Prize Global Regional Competition in Bogotá and the 2020 Rabobank-MIT Food and Agribusiness Innovation Prize finals, she’d buffed up the startup’s presentation, polished answers to potential questions, and emerged ready to win.

Her team’s efforts paid off, as SuperPetFoods took second place (and was voted audience choice) at LAUNCH Demo Day May 1, netting $20,000 to move into the summer phase of developing her eco-friendly dehydrated pet food, made from black soldier fly larvae. Digiventures, a Berkeley Haas MBA led team that built a platform enabling Latin American customers to be evaluated for credit, took the top prize.

Missing from Demo Day, however, was BumpR, an undergraduate team aiming to produce an inexpensive Internet of Things (IoT) device that drivers mount on their cars to easily collect data over geographic areas. The startup, founded by Armaan Goel, Aishwarya (Ash) Mahesh, Shreya Shekhar, all M.E.T. 23 students, and Justin Quan, BS 23 (Electrical Engineering & Computer Science), didn’t make it to the finals, mainly because the team pivoted right before the semifinals and ran out of time to do the necessary customer interviews to vet their new idea.

BumpR will continue to work on the idea at UC Berkeley’s SkyDeck this fall, as a SkyDeck Hot Desk team. Rhonda Shrader, the executive director of the Berkeley Haas Entrepreneurship Program (BHEP), which sponsors LAUNCH, also helped the team apply for a $25,000 VentureWell grant to prototype and test their product. “The lessons we learned along the way under the guidance of all the LAUNCH faculty will stick with us whether it’s with this product idea or another,” Ash said.

“The lessons we learned along the way under the guidance of all the LAUNCH faculty will stick with us whether it’s with this product idea or another.”

Mar presenting at LAUNCH Demo Day
Mar makes the case that dogs love SuperPetFoods’ product at LAUNCH Demo Day.

We spoke to Mar, who founded the company with Thais Esteves, MBA 21, and Gina Myers, MS 20 (bioengineering), about LAUNCH and what’s next for SuperPetFoods.

What was the biggest challenge participating in LAUNCH during the coronavirus crisis?

There were many challenges. The first was managing the emotional stress that coronavirus brought to this— worrying about your family and evaluating your priorities. As a team leader my biggest challenge was being able to give my team the space they needed while seeing this project as something that could make them feel excited about the future. That’s a difficult balance. You want to give them their space but you also want people to be engaged.

Another challenge was the operational part. Literally, we had to start cooking the food in Washington state, where Gina is staying in her family’s cabin. All the people we contacted to do pet food trials are in Berkeley or the Bay Area.

So Gina is cooking the food you plan to send out for trials this summer?

Gina preparing the food
Gina preparing the food that’s made with the high-protein black soldier fly. Her dog Qora is chief taster.

Yes. Dogs are lucky to have a trained chef from the Culinary Institute of America cooking for them. At this point, Gina has everything she needs to start cooking: a recipe that offers complete nutrition that was formulated with a board-certified pet nutritionist, and the required machinery: a dehydrator and a bag sealer. Our target for the summer is to give 100 free samples to friends, family, and people who have shown interest through Facebook ads.

Depending on feedback we get from people, we’ll be able to go on to a bigger scale and go to local pet food stores. We are at a stage where we are literally testing how people feel about a pet food that is highly disruptive. It’s not only that it’s made of insects. It’s also dehydrated, so people need to add water, stir and serve. This format is more nutritious and tasty for dogs, so we have the hypothesis that pet parents will like it and prefer it to kibble. But that’s for us to test.

You plan is to eventually produce the food in your native Colombia. What’s the timeline this summer?

Producing in Colombia will give us a cost advantage and that is a crucial element of our operational model. However, we are focusing our efforts on two fronts this summer: testing product market fit and building the brand identity.  First, we need to collect feedback on our product. All of our work so far was gathering consumer insights and understanding their sentiment around feeding their pets insects. Now we will get their feedback with an actual product. Second, we need to develop the brand identity and translate that into a website, package, and logo. We already conducted an A/B test that proved that  the sustainability angle has more appeal than the nutritional one. Next step is to define which tone to convey around sustainability. We need to identify which is more effective: the loving, caring, tree-hugger kind of tone, or the more vigorous approach targeting changemakers who are empowered to make a change in the world.

What was most valuable about the LAUNCH experience?

Belonging to a cohort of collaborative teams. The collective brainstorming when you present progress and roadblocks, and having the other teams there. They help you think  and you can identify elements from listening to them that might be useful for you—like what platform you’re using to set up your website. It’s a good place to get help. The second thing is you see how the teams are progressing and that allows you to have accountability for what you are doing.

 

Can’t sing? These undergrads have a karaoke booth just for you

| by Kim Girard
Aayush Tyagi (left), Luofei Chen and Noah Adriany have launched Oki Karaoke, a startup that hopes to bring soundproof karaoke pods to the U.S.
Luofei Chen (center), a student in the Management, Entrepreneurship and Technology Program (M.E.T.), has joined with Aayush Tyagi (left), and Noah Adriany (right) to bring soundproof karaoke pods to the U.S. (UC Berkeley photo by Irene Yi)

During a trip to China last year, Luofei Chen arrived at the airport a few hours early. Spying a soundproof karaoke booth, he decided to pop in and kill some time singing.

“I thought I’d spend 15 minutes in it. I ended up using it for an hour and a half. I think I was the last person to get on the plane,” says Chen, a freshman in the rigorous Management, Entrepreneurship and Technology (M.E.T.) program, which awards students two undergraduate degrees—one from Berkeley Haas and one from Berkeley Engineering—in four years.

Chen, who has always enjoyed karaoke with friends, says he got hooked on the fun of singing by himself. The karaoke booth, he adds, felt “like singing in the shower, but with better equipment.”

So, when he got back to the United States, he huddled with his roommate Noah Adriany, a first-year architecture major at Berkeley who also loves karaoke, and the two decided to find a way to bring soundproof karaoke pods, already popular across Asia, to U.S. airports and shopping malls.

Six months later, their startup, Oki Karaoke, is manufacturing its first karaoke booth, and it’s on track to arrive in California from China in May. This summer, the students will pilot test the booth in the Westfield San Francisco Centre in downtown San Francisco.

Dorm development

Their mission began in their Unit 2 residence hall, where Chen and Adriany invested their own money, about $1,000, to build a rudimentary prototype — an open karaoke booth equipped with a computer tablet and a video screen that plays music videos. They spent more than 40 hours a week for two weeks creating it in a makerspace in the campus’s Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation. Then, they installed the pod in their dorm’s lounge and used it to do research on the residents

A prototype of the soundproof glass karaoke booth being manufactured by Berkeley students
A prototype of the soundproof glass karaoke booth being manufactured by Berkeley students that will be installed in Westfield San Francisco Centre (Image courtesy of Luofei Chen)

“People really responded to being spontaneous and singing whenever they wanted to,” Adriany says. “We tracked up to 1.5 hours of singing every day with the 18-to-25-year-old age group during the two months we had the prototype installed.”

After the team took down the prototype in February, they moved forward with a plan to design Oki Karaoke’s first commercial soundproof karaoke booth. The 8-foot-tall booth, roomy enough for a maximum of four people, will have privacy options, such as curtains, for singers and will feature a video screen and a library of more than 1,000 English-language songs. Customers will be charged by the minute; further pricing details are in the works.

“Our target customers range from solo singers to a few friends to couples hanging out in the mall,” says Chen, who speaks Mandarin, prefers pop tunes and wants to add songs in Chinese to the library soon.

Mentors move it forward

Mentors, along with $5,000 in seed funding from Haas’ Trione Student Venture Fund, are helping to move Oki Karaoke forward.

Stephen Torres, a Berkeley Engineering lecturer who teaches in the M.E.T. program, helped the founders develop their idea. Torres then introduced them to alumni Kai Huang, who earned a B.A. in computer science in 1994, and his brother, Charles, who graduated in 1993 with a B.A. in both economics and Asian studies. The pair co-created the blockbuster Guitar Hero games.

“They’ve gone through a lot of the same things we’re going through now with everything from licensing to manufacturing, and they’re helping us to build our company,” Chen says.

Help from Berkeley LAUNCH

The team, which now includes a third co-founder, Aayush Tyagi, a Berkeley junior majoring in electrical engineering and computer science, is currently participating in Berkeley LAUNCH, the UC-wide startup accelerator and competition designed to transform early-stage startups into fundable companies.

Rhonda Shrader, executive director of the Berkeley Haas Entrepreneurship Program and who serves on the LAUNCH faculty, said business models like Oki Karaoke’s don’t automatically translate from one part of the world — like China, where solo karaoke booths are in wide use — to another.

“Applying the skills they’ve learned in the LAUNCH accelerator can help them mitigate the risk and get to success more quickly,” Shrader says.

Oki Karaoke’s founders plan to stay in Berkeley this summer to work on the business and participate in Real Startup, a Bay Area entrepreneurship program that works with companies like Google, Warner Music Group and Apple to mentor students interested in music, media or entertainment technology.

With their first booth on its way, the founders are looking forward to getting customer feedback. “If we can prove that our pod works and that people love it, then we can possibly get the money to build 10, 20 or 40 more booths,” Chen says.

He adds that he’s excited to get the Oki Karaoke booth rolled out for altruistic reasons, too.

“Singing is a way to happiness,” Chen says. “It’s a very easy way to have fun.”

 

NOTE: Antoinette Siu contributed to this article.

Inaugural class of M.E.T. students prepare to study business and engineering

| by Kim Girard
Students in the inaugural M.E.T. class.
The inaugural M.E.T. class (Photo: copyright Noah Berger)

Growing up in the Silicon Valley, Arvind Sridhar says he always had the feeling that he could change the world. In high school, he pursued research in biomedical engineering and worked on tissue regeneration projects for organ replacement, using high-level computer code and programs to analyze his tissue data.

On top of that, Sridhar founded a nonprofit organization that promotes geographic literacy in schools. “I really enjoyed the experience of leading an organization from its inception and making the tough decisions,” said Sridhar, who graduated from Bellarmine Preparatory in San Jose in May 2017.

When it came time to apply to college, Sridhar feared he’d have to choose between tech or pursuing his entrepreneurial bent in a business program. But his timing was right: Sridhar will study both fields as one of 40 students welcomed this week into the new Management, Entrepreneurship, & Technology (M.E.T.) program at UC Berkeley.

Arvind Sridhar, a first year in the new M.E.T. program at Haas.
Arvind Sridhar, incoming M.E.T. student

“M.E.T. will lay the groundwork for the next generation of entrepreneurs, CEOs, and Silicon Valley leaders,” said Marjorie DeGraca, executive director of the M.E.T. program.  “These students will study together in a tight-knit cohort, learning from each other and from close mentoring relationships from top faculty in both schools.”

The program, a collaboration between the Haas School of Business and the UC Berkeley College of Engineering, grants graduates two degrees—in business and in engineering—in four years, with the goal of providing deep leadership and technology skills.

A less than 3 percent acceptance rate

The M.E.T. program is highly competitive, drawing about 2,500 applications for just 40 slots in the inaugural class—an acceptance rate of less than 3 percent. The class is 30 percent women, with students enrolling from 12 states across all regions of the US and from four other countries.

Undergrads who are admitted to M.E.T. combine business courses with one of three engineering tracks: electrical engineering & computer sciences; industrial engineering & operations research; or mechanical engineering. They spend time in class at both schools throughout the four years.

During a Haas welcome session and tour this week, students discussed the meaning of the Berkeley-Haas Defining Principles (Question the Status Quo, Confidence Without Attitude, Students Always, Beyond Yourself) with Erika Walker, assistant dean of the Haas undergraduate program.

Female M.E.T. students raise hands at orientation.
The M.E.T. program acceptance rate is less than 3 percent.

Walker explained what the students needed to know to thrive as undergraduate business majors, while other staff members highlighted the many resources available to them—including study-abroad programs, case competitions, the Berkeley-Haas Entrepreneurship Program, and the Dean’s Seed Fund for startups.  When asked whether they planned to get involved with a startup, most students raised their hands.

“We’re all motivated”

Helen Tang, who worked throughout high school at nonprofit Givology that connects online donors to students and grassroots projects worldwide, said she’s been impressed by the diversity and enthusiasm of the M.E.T. cohort.  “There are people from all experiences and all walks of life here. And we’re all motivated,” she said.

M.E.T. student Helen Tang
Helen Tang

That’s surely true for Abhi Samantapudi, who served as state president of Michigan’s DECA business club for high school students, worked as a business analyst at startup Hindsight, and started a nonprofit, recruiting 14 volunteers who tutor kids in Detroit’s public schools. In M.E.T., he will focus on electrical engineering & computer science.

“This week has really been extraordinary,” he said. “Almost no other school provides an opportunity to bond with such a smart group of kids and provide the personalized attention we’ve had from the staff. It feels like a really tight-knit community.”

A donor-funded program with an influential champion

The M.E.T. program is funded entirely by donors, with more than $15 million raised for the program through contributions from a variety of individuals, including alumni of the two programs and members of the tech community. Michael Grimes, electrical engineering/computer sciences (EECS) 87, who is head of Global Technology Investment Banking at Morgan Stanley and the founder of the M.E.T. Program, welcomed the students during several orientation sessions.

M.E.T. is designed to fast-track technology careers, Grimes said. The program is already gaining attention among Grimes’ Silicon Valley brethren: Kleiner Perkins announced it will give an interview to every incoming M.E.T. student for its prestigious fellowship.

“Typically students seeking an advanced career in technology management first focus on earning an engineering undergraduate degree, get hired, then return to school for an MBA,” Grimes said. “M.E.T. speeds up the process by turning nine years into four.”

Michael Grimes, M.E.T. program founder, chats with students
Michael Grimes, M.E.T. program founder, chats with students. (with program director Marjorie DeGraca)

Ryan Scholes, who joins the program from Virginia and is enrolled in the industrial engineering track, said he was planning to go to graduate school, but says now there’s an option to do just four years.

And while UC Berkeley students in the past have managed to complete dual degrees in both business and engineering as undergraduates, they’ve done it independently, taking on an intense course load with little coordination between the business and engineering programs. “With M.E.T., we’ve brought together a community of like-minded peers, and will provide them with hands-on opportunities that connect everything they’re learning in a unified experience,” DeGraca said.

Sridhar said he’s found the experience incredible so far. “I feel like this program was created just for me,” he said.

Undergrads embrace Defining Principles

As the cohort of M.E.T. students acclimated to campus, a total of 356 new Berkeley-Haas undergraduates continued their orientation this week, gathering at Andersen Auditorium this week for a welcome from Dean Rich Lyons and to learn more about life at Haas.

The acceptance rate for the incoming undergrad class was 14% and the class includes 259 continuing and 97 transfer students. The Berkeley students have an average GPA of 3.7, while the average among transfers is 3.9. The class is 46 percent women.

“These students are clearly engaged and super motivated and excited to learn,” Walker said. “We’re so excited for what they will achieve over the next two years.”

Following the session, the entire auditorium stood, raised their right hands, and pledged: As a member of the Haas community, I pledge to be a Student Always, think Beyond Myself, Question the Status Quo, have Confidence without Attitude, and be Invested in Integrity. 

Walker then asked students to share their reflections of the day. “They all spoke about how engaging in the conversation (about the Defining Principles) made them feel a part of the community—and that it was a real community that cared,” she said.